Put Your Money Where Your Cloud Is

The Cloud has become a buzz word today as more companies recognise its potential. Cloud services like those offered by Google are now widely in use by everyone, with Gmail being many people's first choice for email management and providers like SugarSync being used for document access and file backups. By allowing users to access their data through a web portal, these Cloud services allow us to save computer memory, time and money by storing data remotely. Increasingly, banks are starting to make a shift to the Cloud wherever they can as Cloud technologies become ever more secure and robust. Over 70% of banking executives have expressed an interest in investing in the Cloud in the future, a number that is growing year on year. Other industries have already transitioned into using the Cloud, however banking organisations and financial services have taken longer to embrace this technology due to concerns over compliance and data security. A need for rigorous security and carefully controlled access has meant that the financial world has waited to be certain of the safety of modern technology before actioning any changes. The main impetus behind this new shift to the Cloud has primarily been down to pressure in the industry to consolidate the costs of IT. In just the same way that businesses in other industry sectors have realised that they can save on costs by switching their companies to a cloud computing system, so banks have now realised that the cloud is presenting a strong business case for cost effectiveness and good value for money.

Why is Cloud Computing a Good Choice?

When companies shift over to the Cloud, the way in which their services are managed and delivered also changes. Instead of using a fixed physical platform over the long term, a more flexible and agile approach is encouraged by Cloud computing. Migration is no longer a one off activity and a new mindset is needed towards portability and workloads. With the need to address the growing demand on data input, the banking industry has grown to realise that a modern data centre must be able to reflect the constant inflow and outflow of data across an increasingly diverse environment. Technology that has no need of like-system migration is much more efficient and allows banks to progress forward with their business development without any worry over disruptions caused by a changing infrastructure. Migration to Clouds has become a much more viable option for today's banks and it can really profit their business in the long term.

Taking the Right Approach

Migration to the Cloud is an ongoing project, with the banking industry's' IT teams having to look at the best way to make the change without having too much impact upon daily operations. When workloads are ready to be migrated they can easily be shifted to new platforms by adopting the same strategy. Migration can lead to costly downtime if it is not executed correctly, but by choosing the correct migration tools, it is possible to shift data and server images to cloud platforms without the need to take the original system offline. This cuts the chance of migrations failing and also means the team are able to return to the previous platform without difficulty. An approach that is built around mobility of workloads aims to give banking IT a greater agility and flexibility that cannot be attained when tied to a specific hardware or storage platform. Through the process of decoupling workloads from an operating system, servers and storage layers, it is possible for banking IT teams to deploy all of those applications in the most sensible locations for both economic and performance reasons. Therefore, for the entire banking sector, a switch to cloud computing is essential for supporting major customer facing services and applications across all of the various aspects of their business activity. Making the switch to Clouds is also part of a banking IT team long term strategy which involves choosing the best platform for each application. When the financial industry migrates more services and data to Cloud computing with minimal downtime, it can rest assured that there will be bright returns in its future.